Sebastian Fest Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Updated Tuesday, February 27, 2024-17:29

  • Argentina Milei closes the Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism: "It is useless

Javier Milei is giving himself all the pleasure: after sealing peace with Pope Francis and getting emotional until offering several bows to Donald Trump, the Argentine president has

called a show of American reminiscences

for this Friday, a night session to inaugurate the parliamentary year.

No one can deny the coherence of the head of state, because on the day of his inauguration he ignored the legislators and settled on the steps of Congress to give his speech.

This time, in a decree known on Monday night, he decided

to inaugurate the period of ordinary sessions

on a

Friday at nine at night

, an unprecedented time in Argentine democracy, which always inaugurated ordinary sessions at noon.

Thus, the Legislative Assembly will be transformed into

a kind of 'State of the Union'

, the speech about the State of the Union given annually by the presidents of the United States, a country that Milei admires and whose forms and rites he has tried to imitate in the less than three months that he has been in the Casa Rosada.

Milei's provocation to a Parliament in which

it has little more than 10% of its own legislators

, occurs in the context of a confrontation never seen before between the central government and the governors of the 23 provinces and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires .

Funding cuts to the provinces

The Milei government has cut funds to different provinces.

On the one hand,

a debt was collected

from the

Patagonian province of Chubut

, whose governor, Ignacio Torres, was furious: he maintains that he had requested the Casa Rosada to refinance his debt and that the 13.5 billion pesos (13

million euros)

) discounted are a measure of discipline.

"They want to kill a small province to discipline

," said Torres, who is part of the PRO, the party of Mauricio Macri and Patricia Bullrich, today Milei's Minister of Security.

Torres leads a rebellion of the six governors of Patagonia, who assure that this Wednesday they will paralyze oil production for one day.

Bullrich, president of the PRO, believes that this is "obscenity" and cut ties with Torres.

Milei's advance like a 'bulldozer' and without measuring consequences affects the party of Bullrich and Macri, which until a few months ago was the one designated to succeed Peronism in the Casa Rosada, as head of the opposition coalition Together for Change, and which Today it is experiencing a serious crisis.

"Those around Bullrich suspect that Macri has a much more active role in the Chubut

affair

than he will be willing to admit,"

Página/12

, a newspaper related to Kirchnerism, said on Tuesday.

"' They

directly

believe that

Macri is behind everything

. One hypothesis is that Macri sent the governors to press so that Milei comes to the foot (gives in) and negotiates what would be the colonization of the cabinet. Others have a more psychological theory: that Macri "he can't stand Milei achieving what he couldn't during his mandate."

In such a rarefied political environment, convening Parliament on a Friday night is a decision with an air of revenge by a president who saw the lavish 'omnibus law' with which he aspired to turn Argentina around like a sock fall there.

However, Manuel Adorni, spokesman for the presidency, justified the change in the speech's schedule: "It seemed reasonable to us, since

there will be a greater turn on (audience)

" on

television

, he argued.

The newspaper

La Nación

has recalled that in recent weeks the president "referred to Congress as a 'rat's nest' and called legislators 'extortionists' and 'coimeros' (usurers)", and that he also "opened fronts of "conflicts with governors of different political affiliations due to funding cuts."

Milei considers legislators as part of "the caste", which in his understanding is made up of all those who do not share the direction that his government is taking, marked by an ultra-liberalism that aspires to reduce the presence of the State in life to a minimum. public.

This Friday night, in an unprecedented parliamentary show, history will add a new and unpredictable chapter.